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1GB of Google Drive Storage Now Costs Only $0.02 Per Month

Posted by timothy on from the even-I-can-do-that-math dept.

SmartAboutThings writes "Up until today, I always had the impression that cloud storage was pretty expensive and I'm sure that many will agree with me. It's a good thing that some bright minds over at Google have the same impressions as they now have drastically discounted the monthly storage plans on Google Drive. The new monthly storage plans and their previous prices are as follows: $1.99 for 100GB (previously $4.99), $9.99 for 1TB (previously $49.99), and $99.99 for 10TB.The 2 dollar plan per month means that the price for a gigabyte gets down to an incredibly low price of only two cents per month."

20 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by ravenlord_hun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...with the company that specializes in data mining!

    I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

    1. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by alen · · Score: 5, Funny

      OMG, google will know where i've taken all the photos of my kids

    2. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by tiberus · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ever get the feeling Google should be paying us $.02/month per gigabyte, just sayin'

    3. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by JMJimmy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Seriously. This "article" reads more like an ad. $120/year for 1 TB is more than 9 times what I'd pay for 5 years of a 1 TB internal SATA.

    4. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Seriously. This "article" reads more like an ad. $120/year for 1 TB is more than 9 times what I'd pay for 5 years of a 1 TB internal SATA.

      There are several problems with the whole "cloud" thing:

      - I can buy a few terabytes of local storage for the same or less than paying Google
      - Google constantly changes things (features, terms of service, etc) and if you don't like it, tough shit
      - Encrypted or not, you have no control over your own data, they do
      - ISPs severely throttle upload speeds. Getting a few terabytes into the cloud will take a really long time

    5. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you take a photo of your own nude baby child and upload it to your Google Drive, I'm sure the law is badly written enough to the point that you were "uploading child porn on the Internet".

      The morale of this story is: don't have children, the government will use them against you one day.

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    6. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by neoform · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And when that 1TB drive fails?

      Cloud storage usually comes with a ridiculously high durability. S3 offers 99.999999999% over the course of a year. Your 1TB drive wont.

      --
      MABASPLOOM!
    7. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Do you carry your SATA drive around with you wherever you go and attach it to every computer you use?

      Yeah, there's a portable SSD in my bag, with eSATA and USB. There's a couple of 64gb SD cards in there too.

      It's smaller than my smartphone and a lot more sturdy. It sits in one of those little slots on the side. Never had a problem with it.

      I've had enough of trusting companies like Google to always have a particular service available and to keep their snoots out of my stuff.

      On the other hand, if a company that doesn't data mine, and encrypts all data and does not acquiesce to NSA requests, then we can do business. But not for free or cheap because of data mining. I don't like F2P. I don't want anything for free. I don't trust anything that's being offered to me for free or for cheap. It just means the true price is hidden and that's creepy.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    8. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by CCarrot · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Seriously. This "article" reads more like an ad. $120/year for 1 TB is more than 9 times what I'd pay for 5 years of a 1 TB internal SATA.

      There are several problems with the whole "cloud" thing:

      - I can buy a few terabytes of local storage for the same or less than paying Google
      - Google constantly changes things (features, terms of service, etc) and if you don't like it, tough shit
      - Encrypted or not, you have no control over your own data, they do
      - ISPs severely throttle upload speeds. Getting a few terabytes into the cloud will take a really long time

      Ah, if only...

      Unfortunately, the biggest problem with Google Drive is that they don't provide any upload throttling at all.

      So...post a folder of pictures to your drive account, then go do something else for a couple of hours, because your internet is useless until Google's done hogging all of your bandwidth...funny, DropBox had this figured out right from the start, yet after over two years of customer complaints, Google still hasn't figured out how to implement this.

      --
      "I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
    9. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Do you carry your SATA drive around with you wherever you go and attach it to every computer you use?

      I used to carry my 2 TB drive with me everywhere until I built my own ssh/sftp server now it is anywhere that has internet and can be accsesed form a tablet with no sata port.

      --
      ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
    10. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by Trashcan+Romeo · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, putting a Sally Mann photograph in my non-shared, non-public SkyDrive account was enough to have an FBI guy visit my house at night and ask to look through my laptop for child porn. Not as unpleasant as an actual prosecution, of course. But a nasty enough jolt, I assure you. And if a local DA felt like making my life miserable for some reason?

    11. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... by viperidaenz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Add 50 watts of power 24/7 for a low-power server to the equation and you've added $420 over 5 years. There's your $600.

  2. Slashvertisement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm curious, how much does it cost to run a Slashvertisement like this? I'm putting together a marketing plan and want to see if it fits within my budget.

  3. NSA Storage Service by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The NSA has an even better deal. The only price you pay for storage of all of your data is your freedom.

  4. Re:Why do you think $.02*12/year/GB is cheap? by DaHat · · Score: 4, Informative

    Do you think data you upload to a cloud storage provider lives on just one hard disk that is plugged into the wall and that's it?

    While some data centers do rely on more consumer level hardware (vs enterprise)... to help make up for the inherent unreliability of consumer level drives, they will replicate the data across multiple HDDs, in multiple racks, and possibly across multiple datacenters... as well as monitor the underlying bits for bitrot and overall integrity... in addition to sometimes offering backup options of what has been stored.

    And this aside from offering you 24/7 access to the data from anywhere in the world while keeping that HDD and the attached server running (and power consuming) and with a redundant power system available.

    All of these things quickly add up in terms of cost... so yes, two cents/GB is quite inexpensive for cloud storage these days when compared to like offerings.

    --
    Help Brendan pay off his student loans
  5. Amazon Glacier by hawguy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you're looking for long-term archival storage, Amazon Glacier is a pretty good deal at a $0.01/GB. I backed a few hundred GB's of data there and it's only costing me a few dollars/month. Restores will cost money, but if my house burns down and I lose my NAS + backups, I won't mind paying them a few hundred dollars to restore my data to a hard drive and ship it to me. Does Google Drive provide a way to ship your data on a hard drive? It would take me days or weeks to download data over my currrent internet connection (assuming I don't hit my ISP's data cap)

  6. Re:Encryption? by ArcadeMan · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm worst than that, I make randomly-written files, compress them to ZIP, compress them again in RAR, put that inside a GZ, ROT13 the whole thing and then encrypt it.

    And for the cherry on top, I name the file "confidential_data.dmg" before uploading it.

    --
    Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
  7. Linux client by dlenmn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Now, if only they would make a Linux client. Then, I might use it. Until then, Dropbox all the way!

  8. Re:Now we have an answer to the 20TB backup questi by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But that NAS is likely sitting at your location, which means if it gets burned down by insane meth heads or swallowed by a sinkhole, you're good and screwed.

    For my business, I use DFS that replicates our shared drives at all three locations, so I feel fairly confident that an almost up-to-date mirror of the data is being held at two other locations, all of which are separated by a lot of miles. Coupled with offsite backup, I feel the business data is secure.

    At the moment my personal data is on Dropbox, with my absolutely confidential data in a Truecrypt container. Still, Dropbox is kind of expensive for the 7 or 8gb of data I'd like to store, so I will definitely be considering Google's offering. Since both work the same, at least for the PC versions, in that each computer has a full copy of the data, if Google goes offline or pulls the plug, I still have my multiple copies sitting around.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  9. Re:Why do you think $.02*12/year/GB is cheap? by ThatAblaze · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You fail to consider the cost of electricity, or the cost of redundancy in case the hard drive crashes.